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Music and Silence Part II

I have written about the opposition of music and silence before and have been thinking about this post for a while. I still am not sure about the relationship of silence and music here but would like to highlight it anyway. A while ago me and my friend Jo got rather excited about a new (to us) book being published called A Comedy in A Minor Key by Hans Kielson. Kielson wrote the novel in 1947 and it was translated into English in 2010. You can read more about Kielson in this informative Guardian article. The novel itself depicts the story of a German Jew hiding from the Nazis in the home of a family in Holland. It depicts the mundane and dreary aspects of hiding – being confined to a small space from which you can never leave – a rather difficult prospect. As Philip Otterman says, “When the book is sad, it’s never so in a manipulative way.” And I would agree, it doesn’t seem manipulative, but at the same time, it is constantly sad. Partly, this sadness is expressed through silence in the novel. As I suggested in the last post on this subject, silence can be powerful and even loud in its way, pointing towards the unspeakable nature of a feeling or experience. In this novel I believe silence becomes the main character.

Speaking about the death of his parents in Auschwitz, Kielson suggests that there is a sadness that cannot be deleted. He connects his feelings about their death and his own survival to music: “Music is always written in a major and a minor key: they need each other to make the right sound. It’s the same with sadness and happiness.” Kielson allows for the existence of both, hence the comedy and the minor key, the laughter and the sadness. The novel has very warm, awkward and funny moments between the couple who are hiding Nico, yet it is steeped in unspoken sadness. This silence that permeates the novel has a profound way of testifying to events in history that were unspoken on so many levels.

I admire Kielson’s ability to invoke this silence and make it as present as a character. The novel focuses on the couple that harbour the fugitive, Wim and Marie, not on Nico. So even on a basic level he is hidden within the narrative. The whole plot of the novel is about trying to hide him, to not speak of him, not to speak to him (not too much), and to keep it all hidden, both within the house and in relation to neighbours and wider society. Wim and Marie don’t even know his true identity (for safety reasons). So, the reader doesn’t find much out about Nico either, he is hidden from us as well. A passage in the novel describes this silence and secrecy very well:

“A secret! It was not only that they had sheltered him – he himself, his person, his life, constituted the secret. It was as though a no man’s land lay all around him, alien and impenetrable. It was impossible to bridge the gap. Even while he was alive, everything she heard him say, everything she saw – his voice, his movements – was like something seen from the opposite bank of a river while mist hung over the water and masked any clear view. It almost melted away into the impersonal, colourless swirls of fog.”

So here it is, the minor key. The higher note of caring for a fugitive mixed with silence and secrecy. Both exist and neither triumphs. I suppose it is a bit like history. These inspiring stories of brave people who helped hide Jewish fugitives are always connected to the sadness that this should ever have happened.